No, it turns out the advertized amount has nothing to do with the bailout package assembled for the weekend. Instead, €947 billion is the money expected for the 2014-2020 EU budget, which is set at around 1.1% of the gross domestic product of the bloc’s 27 members. That’s the cash typically used to pay for farm subsidies, roads and bridges in poor regions and the EU’s roughly 42,000 civil servants.

Available EU funds can be augmented by matching funds from national governments and loans from EU-backed institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

EU countries will soon begin tortuous negotiations on how to spend the community budget, referred to in mind-splitting jargon as “the financial perspectives.”

ETI now attracts up 1,700 customers per year, roughly half from the private sector and half from government representatives. A typical price for a class is €550.

A recent hit, sell-out class was comitology.

But what does it mean? Comitology refers to the committees of delegates, representing each EU country and chaired by the commission, in charge of fine-tuning EU rules before they’re written into each member’s national legislation.

That makes the committees key checkpoints for the lobbyists tasked with keeping an eye on those €947 billion.

As Stephane Vanderveken of ETI puts it in an email, “with the 2009 credit crunch interest for EU funding has raised.”

About Real Time Brussels

The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.